Not #NotreDameCathedral but 800-year-old-plus modified trees that have been left to die in last 40 years due to water mismanagement. I feel for the French. It’s terrible when you see your significant cultural places and objects destroyed. pic.twitter.com/O94N0U2080
“There was no revolution too be had on the internet. None at all. The idea that there ever was is false. A big fat lie.
Sure, we thought we saw revolutions start on here. We saw people come together to fight governments, stand up to bullies, bring attention to brutality, to show how corporations are stupid and greedy (we did quite a bit of that last one ourselves, if you remember, dear friends). We watched people fight for justice and against political correctness. We watched huge battles rage. And we thought they were exciting and important.
But we were wrong, we slowly realised. We realised those battles were just a spectacle, a distraction from what was really going on. Because those battles were taking place on a battlefield that didn’t matter. On a battlefield that had no way of making a difference. Because that’s a battlefield we don’t own, and never could. New battlefields built just to keep us occupied.
We used to think we could own it, that we were fighting to build communities for ourselves. That it was ours for the taking. To stake a claim for a place we could control and belong, a fight to make ‘safe spaces’ for ourselves. It was a noble thing to think, that we were fighting for our own spaces, but we were kidding ourselves. We never owned these spaces, we never could. They were never ours to own, never ours to control. Instead we watched our battles turn in to spectator sports, our revolutions turn in to infighting. We watched our new communities dissolve into civil wars. We watched our political activists and community leaders become celebrity brands, our tech-utopian visionaries bow to capital and shareholders.
Without knowing - although somehow always expecting it - we let ourselves become nothing more than the content between adverts. Our battles, our beliefs, our loves - nothing more than the filler before the next ad break. We fought battles that we didn’t need to fight - battles that ripped our solidarity apart and distracted us from the we causes we once believed in - just to create clicks and blinks and eyeballs for the advertising networks. We were nothing more than squatters in a space we wanted to believe we owned, paying our rent by giving ourselves away in the name of capital. Our revolution was a sideshow.
Well, not anymore friends. This has to stop. And it will.”
Monday morning reading “Drawing on the dark arts, the domain where magicians and fortune-tellers commune with unknowable, faceless entities, we explore economic and cultural grey areas to reclaim tools of business administration as an artistic medium” #MBAhttps://t.co/yLrhSdeoyfpic.twitter.com/zX6mYPDPJk
This is why degrowth, buen vivir, and associated movements are so important, because they pose the question of “how can everyone have a good life without continuously increasing the amount of energy and materials the economy uses?”
consensus seems to be it was pretty epic. gay penguins, afrofuturism, eugenics, john locke, CRISPR, radioactive glass, skiing, pachamama, witchcraft, the plasticene, biopiracy, feral camels, space photography, xenofeminism, amazonian dark earth and somehow, it made sense.
University of Hawaii-Hilo Hawaiian Professor Larry Kimura has given a Hawaiian name — Powehi — to the black hole depicted in an image produced in a landmark experiment. “Powehi” means “the adorned fathomless dark creation” or “embellished dark source of unending creation” and comes from the Kumulipo, an 18th-century Hawaiian creation chant. “Po” is a profound dark source of unending creation, while “wehi,” honored with embellishments, is one of the chant’s descriptions of po, the newspaper reported. “To have the privilege of giving a Hawaiian name to the very first scientific confirmation of a black hole is very meaningful to me and my Hawaiian lineage that comes from po,” Kimura said in a news release. A Hawaiian name was justified because the project included two Hawaii telescopes, astronomers said. “As soon as he said it, I nearly fell off my chair,” said Jessica Dempsey, deputy director of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea.
ART + SCIENCE features photographs by artists who address a genre of photography that lives at the intersection of art and science. This movement is not new, yet its reach is currently building momentum. More than producing aesthetic images derived from scientific data, science-inspired artists find connections that reflect a common purpose – one that integrates the authenticity of science and the communicative power of art. The sci-art movement promotes dialogue and offers a platform in hopes of improving the world in which we live.
For all it’s flaws, religion has many interesting aspects: It provides an inclusive, communal framework for decision-making under great uncertainty: Faith, Rituals, Virtues & Values.
The contemporary idea that all uncertainty will disappear with better tech is simply foolish.
Black hole, or the question: why is it called even casually “a photograph”, in which ways would it be part of the media archaeology of “photography”, in which ways it definitely is not, and why do we even care about putting it in the context of pictures? #EHTBlackHole
Currently researching shortcuts in London. This one is called the Bat Cave and is used by cabbies to cut from the Strand to Victoria Embankment. pic.twitter.com/gBrwIbaruC
Take a look at this photo of her & her stack of hard drives containing the image data for the @ehtelescope, next to the photograph of Margaret Hamilton and her Apollo Guidance Computer source code. pic.twitter.com/cTiVZn6aqC
The last few years, I’ve taken a bit of a break from Thought Leading. I’ve had my own personal struggles and my thought leading has been directed at overcoming the disruption wrought upon life and by my husband’s cancer and death. I don’t mean to bring up my personal tragedy to get your attention but I do feel the need the need to explain why I haven’t been as active an artists’ advocate as I once was.
However, important things are happening in the world of music royalties and I can’t sit on the sidelines.
—
If you make music for a living, you might have been aware of the passage of the Music Modernization Act last year. The law sets up a non-profit entity called the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) to issue blanket licenses to streaming services and to collect and pay the owners of songs.
If you are a self-published, DIY songwriter, that is you.
Much like SoundExchange collects and distributes your digital performance royalties, this new MLC will collect and distribute your digital mechanical royalties.
This stuff, and mechanical royalties in particular, can be mind-numbingly boring but believe me, if you make a living off your songs, you need to pay attention. Your royalties are at stake and you have a short window of time to act.
Two groups have submitted proposals to the copyright office to run the MLC, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) and the American Music Licensing Collective (AMLC).
I have joined the board of the AMLC because I believe they will get mechanical royalties to the songwriters who earned them.
There is a pot of an estimated $1.2 billion in unmatched mechanical royalties that have yet to be paid to the people who earned them. The streaming services were required to pay the royalties, not to match them. Making a system for connecting songs to owners and getting these black-box royalties to the people who earned them will be primary tasks of the new MLC.
Why should DIY songwriters care?
Millions of songs are recorded every year and the vast majority of them are by “self-published” songwriters and composers like me. We control our own copyrights and are not represented by the major music publishers in the NMPA. We are the ones who will rely on the MLC to get us royalties that in many cases, we haven’t been paid before. I would bet my favorite pair of shoes that self-published songwriters like me wrote the songs that generated that pot of royalties.
The music publishers in the NMPA have direct deals with the streaming services. They have been collecting their royalties and will continue to do so without help of the MLC. This is the part that worries me: written into the law, and in fact lobbied for by the NMPA, is language that indicates board members of the MLC are able to recommend the pot of unmatched royalties be liquidated and distributed to themselves by market share.
This gaping hole in the law should make all DIY songwriters sit up and pay attention. The board of the MLC will get to say what happens to that estimated billion dollars and to all unmatched royalties going forward.
The publishers in the NMPA will not use the MLC yet they can recommend liquidating the pot of unmatched royalties and distributing it to themselves? Will they have any incentive to do the work required to match these royalties to the songwriters who should get it?
Without question, the AMLC has the least conflict of interest, the best technology proposal and the least incentive to recommend directing other people’s royalties to themselves, not to mention their budget is a fraction of the one proposed by the NMPA.
There are other things too. The AMLC doesn’t aim to make a single corporate-controlled database containing information about every composition in the world, which the NMPA does. I think we have experienced enough corporate consolidation of data, thank you very much. Instead, the AMLC’s proposal is for a decentralized network that pulls together data from the 100+ global music rights organizations and will use dynamic indexing, normalization and intelligent matching algorithms to connect songs with owners.
I trust the AMLC to get me my mechanical royalties.
If you are a songwriter,
you have only until April 22 to tell the Registrar of Copyrights which group you think should handle your mechanical royalties.
Click here to make a comment with the copyright office.
Want to learn more?Tomorrow April 10 at 5:30pm Central time the AMLC is holding a town hall. I’ll be there by video conference. You can join on your phone or computer and ask questions by going here:
https://zoom.us/j/188377751
—
To survive in this era as an artist you have to maximize all possible revenue streams: live performances, sync licensing, subscriptions, merchandise, performance royalties, sound recording royalties, mechanicals. It takes some work to collect all the pieces of your royalty pie. Someday, I hope those of us who own our copyrights will be able to enter all our information once instead of many, many times in many, many places.
Imagine being able to identify yourself, your songs, your percentage ownership if you collaborated with someone, and then imagine collecting all the royalties — for the performance, for the recording, for the composition — without having to pay a hefty percentage for the privilege?
That won’t be happening anytime soon. The royalty collection systems are complex and like other complex systems, many parties benefit from that complexity (healthcare anyone?).
The International Space Station (ISS) is a closed system inhabited by microorganisms originating from life support systems, cargo, and crew that are exposed to unique selective pressures such as microgravity. To date, mandatory microbial monitoring and observational studies of spacecraft and space stations have been conducted by traditional culture methods, although it is known that many microbes cannot be cultured with standard techniques. To fully appreciate the true number and diversity of microbes that survive in the ISS, molecular and culture-based methods were used to assess microbial communities on ISS surfaces. Samples were taken at eight pre-defined locations during three flight missions spanning 14 months and analyzed upon return to Earth. The results reveal a diverse population of bacteria and fungi on ISS environmental surfaces that changed over time but remained similar between locations. The dominant organisms are associated with the human microbiome and may include opportunistic pathogens. This study provides the first comprehensive catalog of both total and intact/viable bacteria and fungi found on surfaces in closed space systems and can be used to help develop safety measures that meet NASA requirements for deep space human habitation. The results of this study can have significant impact on our understanding of other confined built environments on the Earth such as clean rooms used in the pharmaceutical and medical industries. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-019-0666-x
Guiz3. Wait a second. What if flat earthers are all just really dedicated trickster types running an Absurdly long con in efforts to drive the development of cheap, Carbon-neutral spaceflight to make sure that every human alive has the opportunity to experience the Overview Effec
— Damien saw the Time-Knife once. Highly Recommended (@Wolven) April 9, 2019
Key observational indicators of climate change in the Arctic, most spanning a 47 year period (1971–2017) demonstrate fundamental changes among nine key elements of the Arctic system. We find that, coherent with increasing air temperature, there is an intensification of the hydrological cycle, evident from increases in humidity, precipitation, river discharge, glacier equilibrium line altitude and land ice wastage. Downward trends continue in sea ice thickness (and extent) and spring snow cover extent and duration, while near-surface permafrost continues to warm. Several of the climate indicators exhibit a significant statistical correlation with air temperature or precipitation, reinforcing the notion that increasing air temperatures and precipitation are drivers of major changes in various components of the Arctic system. […] The Arctic biophysical system is now clearly trending away from its 20th Century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but beyond the Arctic.
The Sandbox Tree also known as the “Dynamite Tree” grows exploding fruits. When fully mature, the fruits explode with a loud bang and fling their hard, flattened seeds at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour. The shrapnel can seriously injure any person or animal in its path pic.twitter.com/bEQMraZyCW
1/ A vulture can fly up to 400 kilometres each day in search of carrion. Little should it care whether this flight takes it from one country to another. The vultures of Spain, however, skirt around the Portuguese border with uncanny accuracy. pic.twitter.com/UE9kjuXWK5
spectral meat fetishes, non-human autopsy, cryptoecological governance, biopolitics of flying bodies, aligning with the restaurant on the same river, grey stone towers outlined in rainbows, set against azure skies.
Consider 2 universes. Universe Omega is a universe in which God does not exist, but the inhabitants of the universe believe God exists. Universe Upsilon is a universe in which God does exist, but no inhabitant believes God exists. In which universe would you prefer to live? pic.twitter.com/NaY7Ho6rtq
A train trip can change you forever. I had my only religious experience on a Ljubljana-Venice one June, arriving 6am. Also the november Oslo-Bergen trip where the world lost every color but for snow white, mineral black and frozen water grey. Some god exists, only by train.
The question ought to be expanded to include: is it possible to protect ourselves from ourselves because of Instagram. Three people died in Grand Canyon National Park, or outside of the Park boundaries but within the Grand Canyon area, over the past nine days. One tripped and fell 1,000 feet while taking a photo. One fell 400 feet, but the cause has not yet been determined. One got lost while hiking.
Excerpt from this
Outside Onlinearticle:
For years, our conversations around Instagram’s impact on the outdoors have generally hit the same few beats: we’ve mocked the wannabe influencers who got too close to moose, complained that our favorite spaces were being loved to death, and wrung our hands over crowded, trash-strewn trailheads. But now land managers throughout the U.S. are taking bold steps to reshape the conversation. And they’re doing it through geotag campaigns, new and improved signage, and updated infrastructure.
Even if we’re not geotagging our favorite spots, we’re likely photographing some of the wildlife for which our national parks are known, like wild horses at Assateague Island National Seashore. And ever more powerful phones give us the courage to inch closer and closer to those animals—sometimes too close.
As more visitors head outdoors, they’re not always careful to follow best practices. Take the iconic bison of Yellowstone National Park. A recent study in the medical journal One Health found that visitors were approaching the animals with alarming frequency, and that roughly half of all bison-related injuries between 2000 and 2015 involved photography, up from 29 percent between 1980 and 1999. “The popularity of sharing selfies on social media might explain why wildlife are approached more closely than when traditional camera technology was used,” the study says, while also referencing incidents in which visitors tried to take selfies with elk, raccoons, bears, and—incredibly—rattlesnakes.
Frankfurter’s death, on Sept. 4 of last year, was reported widely. But the dramatic details of the accident — one of a growing number of fatalities involving young people in search of spectacular photos, often to post on Instagram, Facebook or other social media — have not been made public until now, after being obtained by this organization through a Freedom of Information Act request.
For generations, visitors have taken risks at Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and other national parks. Some have died by getting too close to cliffs or waterfalls while trying to photograph landscapes. A man from Hong Kong died this week at the Grand Canyon when he stumbled while taking a photo and fell 1,000 feet.
Now, however, the internet and social media are changing the equation. The goal is often not to come back with a scenic photo, but rather to come back with a photo of yourself taking a risk, experts say.
“It appears to be a selfie epidemic,” said Michael Ghiglieri, co-author of “Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite,” a 2007 book about fatal accidents in the park. “Today people are trying to prove that they did something,” Ghiglieri said. “In the old days people went out to have an experience. Now they go out to record that they had that experience.”
Between 2011 and 2017, at least 259 people around the world died while attempting to take selfies, according to a study published last year in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care.
Their average age was 23. Three-quarters were male. The most common causes of death were drowning, often by being swept into the ocean by big waves; transportation accidents, like being hit by a moving train; and falling from high places.
“Most people will say, ‘I want the photo, but it’s too dangerous,‘” said Ghiglieri, a former Vietnam-era Army platoon sergeant who has led more than 600 outdoor trips to places as diverse as the Grand Canyon and Rwanda. “Some people — and it’s almost always guys — recognize it’s dangerous, but they don’t internalize it as dangerous. They perceive it like a Hollywood movie set. It’s a disconnect.”
Ghiglieri said there’s not much that national parks can do.
“It’s impossible,” he said. “Even if you built miles of cyclone fencing, someone would climb over it.”
While it’s certainly true that dystopian science fiction has become popular in the last few decades, it doesn’t follow that no one has been putting forward more optimistic pictures of tomorrow. Just because Stephenson and others embraced the dark images of cyberpunk, environmental doom, and whatnot doesn’t mean everyone did. From the 1980s to the early 2010s, the late author Iain Banks (who I have nominated for canonization) spun fantastic visions of a post-scarcity society he dubbed The Culture, which was full of artificially-intelligent robots and ships, giant space colonies, individuals who lived almost forever and regularly swapped genders, and seemingly endless, endless wonder. Similarly, Star Trek went off television from 2005 to 2017, but its vision of post-scarcity goodwill and polite liberalism — what a friend described as the Enlightenment-on-speed — continued all the while on the big screen.
My short response to recent developments is: music communities might do well to consider scene wealth fund models for travel, visas, recording time, journalism, shows #interdependence
Also, way to design for the future within the parameters of the present. Just because there hasn’t been a Cat 6 yet doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be leaning into heavier weather with your Bright Green designs https://t.co/n0SSPCJmgEhttps://t.co/bQ1DhAs9SQ
The fact that Amazon had to make a separate version of Alexa that secures your personal data for healthcare use should be all you need to know about not letting one in your damn home in the first place https://t.co/Lr9j5JrJZR
well stirred #sixpack of old and new music - brought to you by the @farmersmanual_ network and neighbourhood - high quality audio, many free downoads, trendsetter supply chain est. 95 https://t.co/7xczM0lAao
Resources developed by the Climate Impacts Group at University of Washington for tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Oregon, Nevada, and Utah’s Great Basin may prove useful to tribes like the Quinault and the Makah. The collection of resources is designed for the 84 tribes in those regions in their various stages of the climate preparation process. The package will help tribes evaluate impacts, conduct vulnerability assessments, perform adaptation and economic planning, and locate financial resources.
The Makah have already tested out the CIG resources, which provide Western climate science and planning materials tailored to the unique needs of tribal communities. The tribe is currently incorporating those resources into their climate adaptation plan. The tools and resources are useful in taking large regional climate data and zooming in to provide information at a more local scale, Chang said.
“This is super-helpful because many regional climate models can’t provide hyper-local climate projections, which is crucial when making planning and adaptation decisions,” Chang said. Using the CIG models, it’s possible to determine the potential effects on individual streams, rivers, and forests, he said.
CIG researchers reached out to every tribal chairperson seeking input into what climate information their tribe wanted or needed to prepare for climate change, said Meade Krosby, project lead and Climate Impacts Group senior scientist.
All told, it took two years to compile the resources.
The content below was written by Jared Diamond and appeared in the August 1, 1995 edition of Discover Magazine (http://discovermagazine.com/1995/aug/eastersend543). The content of the article article been widely copy-and-pasted by others and often serves as the basis for what people think they know about the island. Here, I try to provide comments to help update the essay with knowledge that we have gained over the past 25 years. In just a few centuries [the entire prehistoric occupation was just 500 years: ca. 1200AD to 1722AD. Radiocarbon dates (Mann et al 2008) show the loss of the palm forest took this entire span of time.], the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest [note that choice of the word “wiping” belies the fact that the palm forest was turned into gardens over the entire prehistoric span of occupation and possibly into European times], drove their plants [large palm trees (Jubea Chilensis) with little economic value] and animals [by animals, Diamond means “seabirds.” Excavations by Steadman et al (1994) show that there were once seabirds on the island that are now extinct.] to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos [according to whom? and when? Archaeologically, we only see changes in settlement patterns after the point of European contact] and cannibalism [there is no empirical evidence of cannibalism on Rapa Nui]. Are we about to follow their lead?
Byzantine consensus
Consensus
Disagree and commit
Derping
Consensus trap
Live and let live
Agree to disagree
Mutual incomprehension
Garden of forking paths
Light speed mutual retreat
Bubble multiverse
UAMI: Unilaterally Assured Mutual Incomprehension. The equilibrium that results from one person both refusing to explain themselves or make the effort to understand the other.
Daddy of agree-to-disagree and granddaddy of disagree-and-commit
This is why we wrote our #nlproc book using barebones PyTorch with good software engineering practices. We were tired of seeing either high level code or poorly written code. Our emphasis is on depth and practice, so you can go create that “superbestlibrary” for your domain/task. https://t.co/dmoWxFXRnc
You know it’s 2019 when Jim Carrey paints a picture of Mussolini being hanged and Mussolini’s granddaughter replies calling Carrey a bastard pic.twitter.com/7tpJspGK5P
Trying to present all sides of a story is just not as good as simply telling all the stories separately. Why present a false synthesis when you can present a truer confusion?
Berlin does not “exist” in any conventional sense. Rather, it is a tulpa conjured by the minds of people who think state-funded art-tech startups constitute a viable organizing principle for society.
Every crashed Tesla is a sequel to Ballard’s Crash & Cronebnerg’s Crash that automatically recorded itself. They are works of art & literature & should all be preserved for posterity, as well as becoming the subject for PhDs @PenguinBooks Classics and @Criterion boxed editions. https://t.co/NzNq3GP6vK
Arrhenius, in 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will increase Earth’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
Good morning. ‘When honeybees and zebra fish, isolated from each other, were allowed to interact through robot intermediaries, researchers observed collective decision-making behaviors between the two animal groups.’ https://t.co/yiY6GRLrLD
Göbekli Tepe, (Turkey) the oldest place of religious worship in the world (9000 BC) It was deliberately abandoned sometime after 8000 BC. Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological discovery of the utmost importance to understand the development of a crucial stage of human societies pic.twitter.com/mlGS5sj1aN
’[T]he creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain how it has been done.’
Challenge your assumptions
Improve your collaborative skills
Contextualise your innovation
Experiment with futureproofing
Embrace serendipity
Design for failure
Prototype and iterate
Build antifragile systems
Cultivate interconnected approaches
My son has developed out of nowhere a kind of idiosyncratic theology. He claims to believe God exists, but that he’s “just a guy” and “not a big deal”.
When governments say ‘we can’t afford to fix the climate’ that’s a lie. There is plenty of money available. We use need to use it to repair rather than destroy…. https://t.co/OYJxgGsc9M
— Extinction Rebellion Australia (@XRebellionAus) March 26, 2019
“The ‘human’ cannot continue to be the sole benchmark against which other beings must be measured in order to count.” Interesting argument against granting natural entities legal status’ -> but clear plea for ‘radical restorying’ https://t.co/8WDqLvNY6F
If you’re annoyed at the outcome in the #CopyrightDirective vote and you live in Sweden, Germany, Czechia, Luxembourg, or another country that has a Pirate Party, remember in the upcoming elections that today the amendments were 5 votes away from being considered. #Article13#EU
In Iceland, Pirates have put fixing the climate on the forefront of our agenda, simply noting that there are no civil liberties without a civilization, and there is no civilization without a survivable climate.
Oh! I’m in @Wired - can grow old having reached at least one life goal.
“We need to open those platforms up or at least make their workings more transparent. It’s not enough just to change the hyperlinks we need to crack the whole thing open.” https://t.co/gJwVRpZxgI
So I’ve been making a system that generates insects with IK procedural animation. It also generates unique meshes and color palettes from scratch for each body part. here is a small selection #procgen#generativepic.twitter.com/vYQCippvRA
Austrian experimental guitarist Christian Fennesz returns with a new album
Agora. Four long tracks recorded in “straightened circumstances” after Fennesz lost access to proper studio space and was forced to record in his bedroom on headphones with limited equipment. Guitar, voice, field recordings and a computer. These tracks sound like living things, breathing and swelling like an enormous dreaming cat. They tap into the alpha waves and circadian rhythms of life.
The art of perception is a wonderful practice. Cultivating patience, kindness, compassion, moderation, humility, simplicity and love not only fundamentally changes our perception of reality - but changes reality itself.
The illusionist Uri Geller has called on the British people to help him in his efforts to telepathically stop Brexit by sending their own telepathic messages to Theresa May’s mind, compelling her to revoke article 50. Geller wrote an open letter to the prime minister on Friday warning her he will use the powers of his mind to stop her from leading Britain into Brexit. He plans to transmit his psychic energy into May’s brain at the “very mystical time” of 11.11 in the morning and evening every day from a secret location near his home in Israel.
“Its difficult to say why a room, a colour, a space, a house, unexpectedly become familiar, become ours. We feel we have inhabited these places; a sense of total harmony makes us forget that all this existed and will continue to exist beyond our gaze.
Lining them up one after another, these places form a sort of strange sequence consisting of stones, churches, gestures, lights, fogs, frost-covered branches, blue seas; they become our impossible landscape, without scale, without a geographic order to orient us; a tangle of monuments, lights, thoughts, objects, moments, analogies from our landscapes of the mind, which we seek out, even unconsciously, every time we look out a window, into the openness of the outside world, as if they were the points of an imaginary compass that indicate a possible direction”
4 years ago it was a hunch - few outside academia knew how to get hold of research findings, few people in academia actually asked their community what they needed.
Dreams as omens of death in Eastern European folk beliefs: walking in a cemetery, bees, monks, bread, teeth falling out, smoke, taking something from a corpse, ceiling collapsing, the death of god, oven falling apart, freshly-dug graves, black clothing, drowning in muddy waters.
I sorted the entire CJK Unified Ideographs Unicode block based on each glyph’s similarity to a pattern, in this case, a short line segment at different height, and created this wavy curve out of a line of glyphs. pic.twitter.com/23Sdhy2uiO
As airlines and safety regulators worldwide scramble to understand why two Boeing 737 Max 8 jets crashed in chillingly similar accidents, more indications are pointing to how an automated anti-stalling system may be linked to the model’s unusually deadly debut. The safety feature—the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS)—appears to have sent both planes into their fatal dives as pilots struggled to keep aloft. The 737 Max 8 and 9 were grounded by regulators around the world last week. Here are key details that have been reported—most significantly by the Seattle Times—about a series of engineering, regulatory, and political missteps that preceded software being installed on a widely used plane without pilots apparently fully understanding its risks.
On 29 November 1917 while campaigning to introduce military conscription, Hughes was the target of eggs thrown by protestors when he arrived at Warwick Railway Station in southern Queensland. Prime Minister Hughes was incensed that the attending Queensland Police would not arrest the offenders under federal law, so when he returned to Parliament he set about drafting legislation to create the Commonwealth Police Force (CPF). The ‘Warwick Incident’ was the last straw for the Prime Minister who was engaged in a range of jurisdictional struggles with the Queensland Government at the time.
I’ve tried a hundred ways to distract myself but I’m still having one of those days when all I want is to abolish the nation state and the wage system and live amongst small, voluntary, self-governing cooperatives. Apologies in advance.
sultan of supercuts @sam_lavigne has produced this incredible 3h46m video of lightworker/energy healer jamie mcgonagill repeating the phrase “that’s true” 11,648 times https://t.co/bSMTMdRzQs
It was always assumed that civilization began with agriculture.
Gobekli Tepe, though, was built 500 years before its people built their first farms.https://t.co/obthKq4f9m
Singaporeans are obsessed with food. We can expound ceaselessly on where to find the best bak chor mee (minced meat noodles) and will queue for hours for a good yong tau foo (surimi-stuffed tofu and vegetables). Perhaps because most of us are descendants of immigrants thrust into an artificial construct of a nation, or maybe because we live in a country that is constantly renewing and rebuilding, one of the few tangible things that connects us to the past and our cultural identity is food. There are many facets of Singaporean cuisine: Malay, Chinese, Indian, Eurasian (a fusion of European and Asian dishes and ingredients) Peranakan (combining Chinese and Malay food traditions), and catch-all Western, which usually means old-school Hainanese-style British food—a local version of Western food adapted by chefs from the southern Chinese province of Hainan, who worked in British restaurants or households.
The reason why I’m writing about [Six Memos for the Next Millennium] is that while I think that they are great memos about writing, the more I think about them, the more they apply to programming. Which is a weird coincidence, because they were supposed to be memos for writers in the next millennium, and programming is kind of a new form of writing that’s becoming more important in this millennium. Being a game developer, I also can’t help but apply these to game design. So I will occasionally talk about games in here, but I’ll try to keep it mostly about programming.
